Sept 19 (Askume) – Social media companies collect, share and process vast amounts of information about users but do little about how smart systems use it, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said in a report released on Thursday.
The report analysed how Meta Platform (META.O) , ByteDance’s TikTok, Amazon’s (AMZN.O) gaming platform Twitch and others manage user data and concluded that many companies’ data management and retention policies are “woefully inadequate”.
YouTube , the social media platform, is owned by Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O).
Communications platform Discord said the report has a mix of different business models and was not advertising at the time of the study.
The other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Social media companies collect data through tracking technologies used in online advertising and by purchasing information from data brokers and other means, the FTC said.
“While these surveillance practices are profitable for companies, they can harm people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms and expose them to everything from identity theft to stalking,” FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan threatened.
Data privacy, especially of children and teens, has always been a hot topic. The US House of Representatives is considering a bill passed by the Senate in JulyWhich aims to address the impact of social media on young users. Meta recently launched teen accounts with advanced parental control features .
Meanwhile, big tech companies are struggling to acquire data sources to train their emerging artificial intelligence technologies . Data transactions are rarely disclosed and often involve locking private content behind paywalls and login screens, giving little or no notification to users who post content.
Most of the companies reviewed by the FTC, in addition to collecting data about how users use their services, estimated a user’s age and gender based on other information. Some companies also collected information about users’ income, education and family situation, the FTC said.
The FTC said the companies collected data from individuals who did not use their services, and some had no way to track how they collected and used the data.
Advertising industry groups criticized the report on Thursday, saying consumers recognized the value of ad-supported services.
“We are disappointed that the Federal Trade Commission continues to characterize the digital advertising industry as ‘mass commercial surveillance,’” said David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an advertising and marketing group whose members include Snapchat, TikTok and Amazon.
